P003/Austria: Effect of message framing on motivation to follow vs. defy social distancing guidelines during the COVID 19 pandemic (original) (raw)

and China. This is the pre-registration plan relating to the project PSA COVID-19 Rapid Project 003 for data collection in Austria. 1) Data collection. Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet. 2) Hypothesis. This study has two primary hypotheses: Hypothesis 1. Compared to the controlling message condition, those in the no message and autonomy-supportive message condition will display: 1a. Higher levels of internalization of, or autonomous motivation for, social distancing 1b. Lower feelings of defiance toward social distancing 1c. Higher immediate (1 week) and delayed (6 month) behavioral intentions to socially distance Hypothesis 2. Autonomous and controlled motivation for social distancing will predict feelings of defiance and behavioral intentions to socially distance. Specifically, 2a. Autonomous motivation for social distancing will predict lower feelings of defiance and higher immediate (1 week) and delayed (6 month) behavioral intentions to socially distance. 2b. Controlled motivation for social distancing will predict higher feelings of defiance and lower immediate (1 week) and delayed (6 month) behavioral intentions to socially distance. 3) Dependent variable. Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. Autonomous Motivation Participants will respond to the stem "I plan to follow social distancing recommendations [in this article] because:" with four autonomous and four controlled reasons for doing so. Example items assessing controlled motivation are "because others would disapprove of me if I did not" and "I would feel guilty if I did not follow the recommendation". Example items assessing autonomous motivation include "the recommendations reflect my values" and "it is personally important to me to follow them". These items, paired with a scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree, were adapted from a previous measure of Perceived Locus of Causality (Ryan & Connell, 1989; Soenens et al., 2009) so that the motivations are appropriate in the context of social distancing and the contents of the article. Autonomous and controlled motivation items will be aggregated into two separate variables to be used in analyses.

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